Entries in virginity
(4)

Taking advantage of a large-scale study in which 14- to 17-year-old adolescent women completed 84 successive days of brief surveys (i.e., “daily diaries”), researchers identified 41 women who reported having sex for the first time during the diary period. The research team assessed how women felt on the day prior to, the day of, and the day after having sexual intercourse for the first time. The women reported greater sexual interest the day just prior to their first intercourse (and on the day of), relative to the day after having sex for the first time, and they reported similarly higher levels of sexual interest on subsequent days on which they had sex (as did their more sexually experienced counterparts in the larger sample).

Humans are wired to bond. In our earliest beginnings, the key to our very survival included co-operative tribes, clans and families. Intrinsic to that system is an individual’s psychological need for attachment and close connection.1 It is no coincidence that our most tortuous punishment -- from grade school to prisons -- is social alienation. Humans don’t do well in solitary confinement, but we do thrive in loving relationships.

In today’s high-supply sexual economy, where the price of sex has dropped to the barrel-bottom price of one well-worded text, it seems bonding has gone out of vogue. And the cultural message in the West is to take all sex, any sex, at any cost.

According to a recent study published in Psychological Science,1 teenagers who wait longer to have sex experience different kinds of romantic relationships later in life compared to teens that start having sex earlier. This 15-year longitudinal study (beginning in 1994 and concluding in 2009) tracked teenagers’ sexual activity and long-term relationships into their late 20s/early 30s. Those teens that had sex before age 15 (23%) were considered “early” sexual bloomers. Most teens (60%) had sex for the first time between the ages of 15 and 19, which scientists consider normal for American teenagers (thus, “on time”), and 16% of teens reported having sex for the first time after age 19, and were labeled “late” sexual bloomers (8% of the sample did not report having sex at all in their lives).

There was big news last week when 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison, a former star of television’s Lost, married 16-year-old Courtney Alexis Stodden, an aspiring country music artist. In case math isn’t your strong suit, that’s a 35 year age difference. And yes, you did read that correctly: she’s only 16.